Planning Council/Cross Project Teams/Accessibility

Contents

Accessibility Team

Members

Tammy Cornell, IBM

Kentarou Fukuda, ACTF Project

Neil Hauge, Oracle

Kaloyan Raev, SAP

Oliver Keim, SAP

Statement of Problem

Currently, many Eclipse Members have a business need to make sure software they consume from Eclipse meets certain Accessibility requirements. Besides just being a nice thing to do, it is often required to "prove" software is accessibility, in order to sell to certain markets or bid on certain contracts.

The "proof" often comes in the form of conducting certain tests and checks and completing a checklist, for long term documentation of what was done to ensure the software is accessible.

Currently, many Eclipse members have their own process and checklists for this accessibility work, but it would be simpler if there was one "Eclipse Accessibility Checklist" which would set the expectation for all Eclipse Projects ... at least all Eclipse Projects participating in the yearly, simultaneous release. And, of course, this "required item" for the yearly release can not be too burdensome for the Eclipse projects.

Our "required" item for Galileo simultaneous release was a 'should do' item, and stated as simply as "... should design and test for accessibility". So another way to state the problem, is whether or not there is a stronger requirement that would lead to a stronger, more demonstrable or measured statement about accessibility compliance.

The ACTF project needs to be enhanced more before it can be widely adopted by Eclipse projects. Currently does not provide tooling for SWT. It currently supports html, flash content, similar function as inspect32... Helios timeframe is to short to build in the additional function.

Confirmed that each team is using the Software, Web & Documentation checklists. Tammy will work on getting a copy of these checklists to possibly include in the 'Should do'/guidelines section of the release train/ emphasize/recommended . http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/index.html

Kaloyan is trying to locate an Accessibility rep to join him on the team

Will most likely break this up into two parts: short term/Helios: update guidance documentation and provide stripped down checklists. long term goal: provide tools (possibly ACTF) to automate Accessibility checking during development.

Tammy is verifying if the above checklists can be used on the Eclipse website.

Kentarou supplied an ACTF presentation that Tammy will distribute to this team

Kentarou will hold a meeting this week with some of the other resources working on ACTF to see what they plan to accomplish in the upcoming months. Kentarou mentioned that this project could use some additional resources/active committers.

May expand Accessibility guidelines webpage to contain basic testing instructions and possibly a link to an open source screen reader (NVDA) http://www.nvda-project.org/

Will try to handle actions via email this week and schedule our next meeting for 10/27.

Meeting 10/27 9:00am US EDT
Attendees: Tammy, Neil & Kentarou

the Accessibility checklists located here: http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/index.html can not be reproduced on the Eclipse website, if we use them we will need to provide a link back to the IBM public website to reference them. ACTION ITEM: The other accessibility cross project team members will research and see if they can come up with something more generic that can be stored on eclipse.org.

will suggest an Accessibility Verification milestone be added to the release train schedule (possibly around the API Freeze)so release train projects will be reminded to do a first pass accessibility check that is early enough so they have time to react to any accessibility

problems/issues.

Neil will draft a recommendation (proposal is due 11/4/09). Will review recommendation in the next meeting on 10/29.

Kentarou is meeting with the ACTF team tomorrow and will have an update/outlook for us in the next meeting.

Kentarou talked to ACTF team. Communicated that resources are currently limited. The team's current focus is to provide an inspection tool that can verify accessibility for platform UI development (based on MSAA usage).

The ACTF team would like to do more, but it's not clear whether they will be able to provide the general automated testing tool for Eclipse given current resource constraints.

Kentarou recommended adding an open issue for the need to find more resources for the ACTF project in the Eclipse community. Also suggested removing dependency on the ACTF tooling from the long term requirement, and add the presence of a checklist. Neil will make these changes to the proposal.

On the topic of the Accessibility Checklist

We should be able to draft something like the IBM checklist, creating it ourselves if necessary

We can probably finalize the checklist after the recommendation deadline since time is running out

Kentarou and Neil will continue to look for accessibility content for the checklist

Meeting 11/3 9:00am US EST
Attendees: Neil, Kentarou, Kaloyan & Tammy

Kentarou - we should also focus on web accessibility which will be used with projects such as e4. Add WCAG to the guidelines.

Kentarou - make sure the proposal explains that the platform focus for now will be with Windows and that other platforms may need to be considered in the future.

Tammy - will add pointers to the generic checklists/guidelines provided by the .gov sites.

Kaloyan will have Oliver review the recommedation and also look into a set of generic checklists that could possibly be used on the Eclipse website.

all agree that until this is automated more, that we will recommend it be on the "should do" list.

Tammy will make a couple of updates to recommendation and then send it around to the cross-project team for final review. Will submit proposal later this week.

Recommendation to Planning Council

Status: Submitted 11/5

Open Issues:

Need testing to determine if we can recommend GNU licensed NVDA open source screen reader. One current barrier for project testing is having to buy a license for the predominant screen reader software. Other short term options might include accessibility test tools such as AccChecker and UIA Verify.

The ACTF project is in need of more resources to pursue longer term goals of automated accessibility testing for Eclipse. We need to look for possible contributors in the Eclipse community.

Proposal:

Accessibility is a key requirement for many Eclipse adopters based on business, legal, and ethical grounds. Accessibility is also an important requirement for disabled end-users of Eclipse. Accessibility has previously been on the "Should do" list with one line of information describing the release train requirements. Building on this foundation in the short-term (Helios), we propose:

The requirement for accessibility remain in the "Should do" or "Good citizen" category, with the thought of moving this to the "Required" category in the future.

Accessibility testing is not something that can be easily automated using Eclipse tools (for now) and testing may require purchase of screen reader software.